Oh, I said. Okay.
She thanked me for my time, said she would be in touch soon, and ended the call. That’s how investigations run, I’ve learned: you’re given a set of questions that feel like someone peeling back your sky, but just before you see what’s causing the constellations to turn, the detectives ring off, protocol being the necessary precondition of justice. And then you hear nothing for a long time.
Weeks went by. Sometimes I had the feeling that my story about what happened at St. Paul’s, which I had tried so hard to tell these investigators truthfully and plainly, with accountability for my own actions and my own forgetting, was like a child—my child, dear to me, imperfect but uniquely mine—and I was now finally sending it into this edifice of criminal and civil justice like a kid into school for the first time. Would it stack up? Would it sit correctly, stand correctly, walk in a line? Would it fit with what the system required?
I waited to hear what they’d made of what had happened to me.
That fall, I started getting emails from people associated with St. Paul’s School. Just trying to confirm my contact details, they wrote. Just trying to “reconnect.” I did not respond.
The school’s alumni office resumed sending me the Alumni Horae magazine. But the address label bore only my husband’s title, plus his first and last name, which I do not use—I was indicated only as Mrs. The first time it arrived, I was sure it was a mistake, and that some man in the area with my husband’s name must have gone there.
Finally, in early November, Detective Curtin wrote to set up a time to speak. Lieutenant Ford joined the call. Their voices echoed on speakerphone from Concord, hollowed and abraded by the room I imagined them in—metal chairs, faux-wood table. I paced my carpet at home, seeing nothing.
“This is one of the hardest calls I’ve had to make,” said Julie, to open.
I couldn’t think what she could tell me that would make things worse. The worst part was all way behind me, long since over.
“What’s happened?”
“I’m very sorry, but I can’t work on your case anymore,” she said.
“What? Why?”
“We’ve been severed from the investigation,” explained Lieutenant Ford.
I told them I didn’t understand.
“Well,” said Julie, permitting an edge in her voice, “neither do we. This has never happened before.”
Julie talked for a few moments, delivering stilted sentences. They had been working up various aspects of my case, but now, for reasons Julie described as “murky,” the attorney general’s office had instructed them to stop working with me entirely.
“So what do I do?” I asked.
“The last thing I would ever ask of a victim is to have to go through the process of giving testimony more than once,” said Julie. “We don’t do that. Even in cases with multiple jurisdictions, we don’t make a victim testify twice. To be frank, any difference in what you say could be used by the defense to discredit you. Anything at all. So if the attorney general’s office asks you for an interview, I recommend you consider that.”
I thought I was beginning to understand: these detectives empathized so thoroughly with victims that they hated to suggest I might have to live through the retelling another time. It’s fine, I thought, I’m tough, I can do that once more.
“Am I going to have to give a taped interview again?”
There was a pause. “Well, we don’t know,” said Ford.
A longer pause.
“The attorney general’s office doesn’t want your file,” said Julie.
I began to feel wild. “Why?”
Ford again, strained: “We can’t say.”
“So my case won’t be included in the cases they are considering against St. Paul’s?”
“We can’t say.” But the attorney general’s office was not interested in my case or in any of the information that had been collected by the Concord Police.
Wildness moved from my fingers into my palms, lacing my wrists, rising up in my belly. The school was at it again—the school was manifest again, had reconjured itself as an entity I could not see or name or talk to but that would force me to be silent. The cascade returned and it was roaring right behind me.
“They’re covering it up,” I said. My voice cracked with anger, and I felt, hearing myself, that I would lose credibility all on my own. “St. Paul’s is covering it up again. They are powerful and they are enormously wealthy and they are going to make it go away.”
Nobody said a word.
“They’re making me go away,” I said.
“We’re not giving up,” said Julie. “I will call the investigator, Jim Kinney, in the AG’s office myself and tell him to talk to you. I already have. I will do it again.”
I rebounded. I was not fifteen. I was in my forties, with a home and a husband, a base from which I could work.
“I will call Jim Kinney,” I said. Knowing his name felt like a foot in the door.
“Good,” said Lieutenant Ford.
“Good,” said Detective Curtin.
Four months had passed since I’d first contacted the authorities.
“I’m sorry I can’t work with you any further,” said Detective Curtin. “I’m so sorry.”
That afternoon I called my pediatrician’s office back in Lake Forest, something I should have done decades before. As a matter of policy, I was told, they destroyed medical records when a patient turned twenty-seven. I had missed the mark by almost fifteen years. But the woman on the phone asked me to hang on, and when she returned she was humming. “Whoo-ee!” she said, all music. “You got lucky!”
She printed it all off microfilm and sent it to me. This is how I saw, for the first time, my pediatrician’s written report of my account of the assault, and the positive culture for herpes. Also included in these documents were pages faxed from St. Paul’s School. The school had
